limited unicode success report, question

Well, xpdf if still not displaying and there are other font issues. I was
debating a reinstall (ugh) because of the way things have sort of gotten
out of hand with this system, but I'm going to defer that for as long as
possible. In spite of the setbacks in learning to use and administrate my
Linux system, I do have an occasional success. Maybe for every 3 or 4
failures I succeed in doing something I need/want to do. This note will
document one such limited success.

Don't know if others recall how, a few months back I was trying to input
unicode fonts into the system. Well, that attempt ended in failure, but I
had another go at it recently and have gotten a bit further. This is with
a Debian unstable system, so I don't know how transferable any of this
will be to other distros/systems. It turns out one secret to inputting
unicode in at least some X applications (can confirm it works in
OpenOffice, which is important for me, and Mozilla) is to use setxkbmap.
From the command line, as root I presume, run, for example "setxkbmap ru."
That maps your keyboard to standard Russian layout and, if you have fonts
installed, allows inputting them in X apps like OOo. I've tried it and it
works. I've succeeded to some extent with both Russian and Greek fonts in
this. (caveat: you might want to enter "setxkbmap us" into the terminal to
start with since, if you have no Russian or Greek terminal fonts, you will
lose ability to enter input into the terminal and could have problems
getting English back. If you enter that first, as I'm suggesting, you can
just scroll back in your bash history to restore English) Yet another
option that gives something like the keyboard switching capability Windows
users can have involves editing XF86Config-4. This works for XFree86
4.3.something, but may not work for earlier releases. I found this
information in the file /etc/X11/xkb/README.config. Edit the keyboard
stanza in XF86Config-4 as follows (excerpt from the help file mentioned
above):

"Let's say you want to configure your new Logitech cordless desktop
keyboard, you intend to use three different layouts at the same time - us,
czech and german (in this order), and that you are used to Alt-Shift
combination for switching among them. Then the configuration snippet
could look like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Keyboard1"
Driver "Keyboard"
Option "XkbModel" "logicordless"
Option "XkbLayout" "us,cz,de"
Option "XKbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle"
EndSection"

I tried this and, sure enough, after restarting X, I can use alt-shift to
toggle between keyboard maps/fonts in OOo (I replaced "us,cz.de" with
"us,ru,el" to suit my needs). Another post at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&th readid=221053
even describes an additional entry to make the scroll lock LED light up
when the non-native input method is selected.

Given that I've gotten this far, why do I speak of "limited success"?
Here's why. I need a Greek keyboard map that allows inputting of
diacritical marks, and I'm beginning to doubt that such an animal exists.
If you know of one, please do let me know. Another hang-up, though one
likely a bit easier to address, is the Russian keyboard map that ru
respresents: it's the traditional Russian typewriter layout, and I need a
phonetic one. It seems ru_yawerty is what I need, but I can't succeed in
loading it so far. But I have some ideas, as follows.

In the directory /etc/X11/xkb/symbols there are whole lot of what appear
to be keyboard maps listed - ru_yawerty among them. When I try to load
it, I get no errors in the terminal I run setxkbmap from, so it seems to
work. But no Russian font appears when I type. If I do ctrl-alt-F1 and
look at (I guess) stdout, I see something like "couldn't load
pc/ru_yawerty." I see a pc directory under the symbol directory mentioned
above, and there is, in fact, no ru_yawerty in it. My keyboard is
registered in XF86Config-4 as pc104. So, maybe all I have to do is copy
ru_yawerty into that /etc/X11/xkb/symbol/pc directory and it will load?
What do you think? Furthermore, if it does seem like this will work, why
isn't that keyboard map in the pc directory to begin with?

Help will be appreciated. If I can get the phonetic keyboard layout for
Russian part of my unicode input problem will be solved - at least for
now. I fear the Greek diacriticals problem will be insurmountable at the
present stage of development though.

Thanks, James
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unicode input success report - final?

Maybe this will be a final report on this issue. Most importantly, since
my last post I've been in contact with the author of xwingreek - a Russian
fellow who programs in Java and Python who also has an interest in
polytonic Greek (Greek with diacritical marks) input. He's been a great
help. Xwingreek is actually a bit deprecated. He's written new keyboard
switching programs that integrate into OpenOffice.org and M$Word: these
allow switching between up to 3 keyboard maps/fonts. He refers to the
programs as "Thessalonic" and "PyUNO" (the latter being the one written in
Python). I did not succeed in finding either in the Debian repositories I
have or in the OOo user interface - despite the fact that he thinks PyUNO
is already incorprated into Debian's OOo release. But that's not too
important to me since I'm taking the other approach I mentioned earlier
(editing XF86Config-4 to allow for keyboard map/font switching for X
apps). He's also helped me out with this. He's pointed out to me that
there is an additional line possible in the keyboard stanza of
XF86Config-4 (this refers to 4.3.0something and may not apply to earlier
releases): the "XkbVariant" line. In order to get the phonetic Russian
and polytonic layouts (or at least a semblance of polytonic) I want, I've
added the "XkbVariant" line with ",phonetic,polytonic" following. That
has gotten me most of the way to where I need to be in entering unicode
input into Xapps. It also works in a console if you have the right fonts
installed. As an additional detail, I should mention that I think you
must have a unicode locale specified in your system for this to work. In
my case, I've set locale to en_US.UTF-8 (how to set that varies by
distribution: dpkg-reconfigure locales is how Debian does it). I'll
provide the relevant section of my XF86Config-4 for those interested:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Generic Keyboard"
Driver "keyboard"
Option "CoreKeyboard"
Option "XkbRules" "xfree86"
Option "XkbModel" "pc104"
Option "XkbLayout" "us,ru,el"
Option "XkbVariant" ",phonetic,polytonic"
Option "XKbOptions" "grp:alt_shift_toggle,grp_led:scroll"
EndSection

Note the "grp_led:scroll" segment too, which causes the scroll lock LED
on the keyboard to light up when I'm in one of the alternate keyboard/font
mappings. In summary, I've written this in the hope it may help someone
else wanting to do this under Linux. Having researched and written it up,
I can't say I feel much sense of accomplishment. The reason there is a
need for such a description as I've written is because Linux is lacking in
certain user-friendliness features that a certain, non-geekish segment of
the population needs. The real need is for programmers to fill that gap
by writing programs that will do this sort of thing: already the Russian
fellow I've mentioned above is doing this and I've heard of others. Thus,
my little research/how to project here could likely be itself obsoleted
pretty shortly.

James
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